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Never one to shy away from any kind of excuse for festivity, I am happy to broadcast that today is my birthday. On this note, I confess that I am terrible at remembering other people’s birthdays. And when I do remember it’s usually on the actual day and too late to be able to send a proper […]

How cool – this coming Valentines weekend I will be toasting some very good friends tying the knot ‘up north’. I’m usually terrible at remembering days like this and, unlike my other half, am much more likely to be the one picking up some tired looking ‘gift’ in the corner shop than he is. So, […]

G’day cobbers – today is Australia Day! I am always reminded of this since my Aussie boyfriend never lets this day pass without due fanfare. In fact, we had a pre-Aussie day BBQ this weekend – replete with bottles of Crown Lager, marinated prawns on the barbie, Aussie snacks such as Burger Rings, Shapes and In a Biskit Dixie Drumsticks, as […]

Copies of The Bookseller take a ridiculously long time to circulate in the A&B office (I’m one of the worst culprits – I think I may have a December copy still lurking in my intray somewhere). In the ‘latest’ edition (dated 8th January) that has just crossed my desk, I found a great competition for […]

I love clever word games, play on words etc – and this video takes the biscuit. A palindrome reads the same backwards as forward. This video reads the exact opposite backwards as forward. It was submitted by a 20-year-old in contest entitled “u @ 50″ (run by AARP ) and I think it is simply brilliant. (Make sure […]

There must be something in the water – following hard on the heels of Chiara’s trip to see Chicago, I went to see The Lion King and came bounding out of the Lyceum theatre on Saturday with a whole raft of Disney’s best songs ricocheting around my head. And when I’m not fully-conscious of it, […]

I should have had Broadband up and running in my house by now. I spent over two hours on the phone with Talk Talk‘s Customer Service last night to find out why it had not been installed as yet. It was a call which involved being passed round every one of their departments, sitting in […]

“I’m baking pillows. Burn them slowly, keeps them fluffy! Mmmmmm, pillows.” During a dinner with friends on Friday night we somehow got on to the topic of sleeptalking. My friend’s boyfriend insists that she laughs in her sleep, sometimes so much that she wakes herself up. I thought that makes a nice change from the […]

Last week I went to see the musical Chicago at the Cambridge Theatre (and now consequently break out into renditions of Mr Cellophane and All that Jazz when feeling bored). I’d recently rewatched the movie version so the songs were all familiar to me – except for one that is, the one about ‘class’. And it’s probably my […]

Sometimes the written word can be misread or misinterpreted. And there are some things that really shouldn’t be left open to interpretation. When my Yahoo News bulletin flashed up an article from SkyNews about a Japanese student who was arrested after driving for four miles with the body of an 80-year-old pensioner lodged in her […]

One of my friends bought me this book for Christmas and considering the snowy weather keeping us indoors all weekend, I got to reading. We had a fairly successful summer last year of growing a few of our own vegetables and tomatoes – even now some of our herbs seem to be resolutely battling through […]

As mentioned in previous blogs, I have recently moved flat. And in the process, unsubscribed to SKY Digital TV (2010 is all about saving…) which means for about two weeks I have been surviving on terrestrial televion. Which consequently means (and you’ll note it’s taken me a good five days to own up to this) […]

You may remember back a few months to when I was full of the joys of our hot-off-the-presses ebooks: five brave titles that went out into the digital world as ambassadors for the A&B list – see here. Since then we’ve been working getting other titles converted, being picky in these untested waters, of course, […]

My family are Scrabble nuts. There is nothing we like better than to finish off an evening scheming over the triple word score, agonising over too many i’s or hurling insults at each other for ‘not opening up the board!’ My Ouma is 93 years old this year and she is the Scrabble queen. She […]

WHOOSH! (The sound of something hurtling past) What was that? Oh yes, that would be The Christmas Holidays. Yes, we’re back! (Did you miss us?) We’re sitting here with the heating cranked up, sifting through the mass of emails in our inboxes and getting stuck into work again – in my case armed with copious […]